This has prompted the angry widows of the martyrs of December 13 to return the President’s bravery medals posthumously awarded to them. How shameful! Rubbing salt into the wounds of these families, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil insensitively remarked that they were being “instigated” by certain political elements.

Well, the only political person who rallied the martyrs’ families was Maninder Singh Bitta, former Youth Congress president and himself a victim of terrorism. Patil also startled many in the country by stating that the government’s decision on Afzal’s mercy petition may not come for another six-seven years. Why? Because that’s the average time-frame for deciding on mercy petitions.

By saying so, Patil tacitly admitted that, in his government’s assessment, the attack on Indian Parliament belongs to the same category of ordinary crimes in which many convicted persons have sought presidential clemency. No further proof is needed to know that we are being governed by a breed of politicians ever ready to sacrifice national honour and national security at the altar of narrow electoral considerations.

I am one of those who feel no joy, and only deep pain, whenever anyone is awarded the death sentence. The death of every human being diminishes us all. And few things can be more horrific to think of than the prospect of an innocent person’s life being extinguished by a flawed judicial verdict. On December 14, Afzal has filed a curative petition, a noble judicial provision that enables a convicted person to seek a final review of the court’s verdict. If there is any miscarriage of justice in his case, his life must be spared. Nevertheless, whatever the Supreme Court decides should be the final word in the matter.

However, for some extremists in the “Save Afzal” campaign, it won’t be the final word because their very first word in the December 13 debate is “conspiracy”! Conspiracy, not by the anti-India jehadi terrorists backed by, or based in, Pakistan, but by the Indian state, more specifically by the government of the day, headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

If this sounds unbelievable, go to the nearest book store and buy Dec 13, A Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament, with an introduction by writer-activist Arundhati Roy. Published by Penguin, no less, the book is a compilation of 15 articles by well-known lawyers, journalists and human rights campaigners, none of whom accepts that what the entire nation watched on December 13 was a terrorist attack.

Instead, the book insinuates that the attack was actually stage-managed by the Indian security forces with backing from the political leadership, who used the incident as a pretext to carry out a “massive military mobilization on the Indo-Pakistan border” and thus “pushed the subcontinent to the brink of nuclear war”. After raising “13 Disturbing Questions” (which are now circulating all over the world on the Internet), Roy holds the NDA government guilty of “Complicity, Collusion and Involvement”. There is no need, she adds, “for us to feign shock, or shrink from thinking these thoughts and saying them aloud. Governments and their Intelligence Agencies have a hoary tradition of using strategies like this to further their own ends.”

Never in the history of independent India has an accusation as outrageous as this been made against a former prime minister— and printed and published by a reputed publishing house for worldwide circulation. Those in the UPA government who have chosen to remain silent because Roy and her fellow-activists have trained their guns at the BJP, may kindly note: the book tarnishes not only the reputation of the BJP, but it also rubbishes the prestige of India in the eyes of the international community.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta, one of the contributors, writes: “The Indian State hanged Kehar Singh when it could not find anyone else to hang in order to restore its vitality in the Indira Gandhi assassination case, and this time Mohammad Afzal must serve that necessary function.”

Roy and her fellow-essayists have raised a strange demand in the book: after convincing themselves that the Supreme Court cannot reveal the “sinister truth” behind December 13, they want an “impartial parliamentary inquiry”. How does one describe these activists who, in the guise of their ‘Save Afzal’ campaign, have mounted a full-scale “Defame India” operation? I have no answer.